Social Media and Share Icons plugin provides total control over your social profile and share icons. It’s easy to use and free social media plugin which adds social media icons with tons of customization features to your website. The plugin let’s you add icons for RSS, Email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, ‘Share’ (covering 200+ other social media platforms) and upload custom icons of your choice. With the feature to make your social media icons float or sticky, it allows visitors to subscribe to you blog by Email. You can also display follower counts, and option to show a popup on certain posts and pages. In this post, I will show steps to add social sharing buttons with Social Media and Share Icons plugin in WordPress.
Features of Social Media and Share Icons Plugin
- Ability to pick from 16 different designs for your social media icons
- Make your social media icons ‘float’ or ‘sticky’
- Allow visitors to subscribe to your blog by Email
- Add ‘counts’ to your social media icons
Add Social Sharing Buttons with Social Media and Share Icons
Step 1. Install and Activate Plugin
In the first step, installing “Social Media and Share Icons Plugin” can be done searching for “Social Media and Share Icons” via “WordPress Dashboard > Plugins > Add New” as shown below.
Step 2. Social Media and Share Icons Plugin Settings
After installing the plugin, go to Dashboard and click on the Ultimate Social Media Icons tab to change various settings.
Icons Settings
In this very first step you have to choose which social media icons you want to display in your post or page of your website. There are lists of the social media icons in this option and if you want to have more social media icons, you can upload a custom icon if you have other accounts you want to link to, we have the Custom option.
Icons Actions
The social media icons have their own purpose. In this option you can manage your social icons actions on your blog or website. The actions you can choose may be “Visiting the page”, “Like the blog”, “ Share the blog” or “Follow”. It depends upon you, what you want to do.
Design & Animation
There are 16 different type of themes for the social media icons you can choose from in order to display them and to match up the look & feel of your website. You can upload your own styles of the icons which performs the same action as the other standard icons does. The icons can be animated using the mouse over effects.
Counter Settings
Under this settings you can select the count next to your social media icons. It helps you to know about your website status in the social world and share your contents among the users and also highlight your online activity.
Other Icon Settings
In this section we can change the order of list of how the social media will appear from the list of available social media icons using drag and drop function. You can adjust the size and spacing between the icons and align the social media icons to left, right or center. When user clicks the icon, you can choose to open the page in new tab or the same one and choose number of icons to be displayed in row. In order to float or sticky or none your social icons we have the sticking and floating option. You can define your own text to be displayed when a mouse is hovered in the social media icon with mouse-over text option.
Icons Display in Post
This section helps you to display social media icons in every post you publish in your website. You can align your share icons to left, right or at the center of your post along with the text that appears before the sharing icon.
Popup Option
Popup option helps you to define the design and layout to the displaying pop-up in your site. You can change the text that appears above the social media icons , it’s font family, font style, the color of text and the text size. The box in which the icons are displayed, you can change its background & border color and border thickness & shadow. You can select when and where shall the pop-up be shown in your post or page.
Subscription
You can set up email subscription form to allow visitors to your site to receive newsletters, updates, or other manual things.You can place the subscription form by Widget, Shortcode and copy & paste HTML code into your website where ever you want to. You can change the form appearance by changing the text to be displayed for subscription, font family, the font color, size, style and its alignment
After completing all the setting, now click on Save All Settings button to save all your settings for the plugin.
Step 3. Adding Social Media and Share Icon in Widget
For adding social icons in widget, go to Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets. A new screen will appear where a new widget Ultimate Social Subscribe Form is added in the Available Widgets section. Simply drag and drop the widget in the Widget Area section. Then click on the widget to edit.
You can add the widget to your sidebar or footer widget area. You have the option to Define Widget Title all other settings are done in the Subscription settings.
Step 4. Viewing Social Media and Share Icons
After the complete configuration of plugin setting, you will see Social Media and Share Icons floating bar being displayed in your post or page along with the pop-up bar of your WordPress website like the image shown below.
As you can see from the configuration guidelines above, Social Media and Share Icons Plugin offers a large number of features to configure the related posts on your website. The plugin’s settings are well organized, easy to understand and is able to give the desired output.